Sunday, May 28, 2017

When ExtraTorrent shut down last week, millions of people were left without their favorite spot to snatch torrents.

This meant that after the demise of KickassTorrents and Torrentz last summer, another major exodus commenced.

The search for alternative torrent sites is nicely illustrated by Google Trends. Immediately after ExtraTorrent shut down, worldwide searches for “torrent sites” shot through the roof, as seen below.

“Torrent sites” searches (30 days)

As is often the case, most users spread across sites that are already well-known to the file-sharing public.

TorrentFreak spoke to several people connected to top torrent sites who all confirmed that they had witnessed a significant visitor boost over the past week and a half. As the largest torrent site around, many see The Pirate Bay as the prime alternative.

And indeed, a TPB staffer confirms that they have seen a big wave of new visitors coming in, to the extent that it was causing “gateway errors,” making the site temporarily unreachable.

Thus far the new visitors remain rather passive though. The Pirate Bay hasn’t seen a large uptick in registrations and participation in the forum remains normal as well.

“Registrations haven’t suddenly increased or anything like that, and visitor numbers to the forum are about the same as usual,” TPB staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak.

Another popular torrent site, which prefers not to be named, reported a surge in traffic too. For a few days in a row, this site handled 100,000 extra unique visitors. A serious number, but the operator estimates that he only received about ten percent of ET’s total traffic.

More than 40% of these new visitors come from India, where ExtraTorrent was relatively popular. The site operator further notes that about two thirds have an adblocker, adding that this makes the new traffic pretty much useless, for those who are looking to make money.

That brings us to the last category of site owners, the opportunist copycats, who are actively trying to pull estranged ExtraTorrent visitors on board.

Earlier this week we wrote about the attempts of ExtraTorrent.cd, which falsely claims to have a copy of the ET database, to lure users. In reality, however, it’s nothing more than a Pirate Bay mirror with an ExtraTorrent skin.

And then there are the copycats over at ExtraTorrent.ag. These are the same people who successfully hijacked the EZTV and YIFY/YTS brands earlier. With ExtraTorrent.ag they now hope to expand their portfolio.

Over the past few days, we received several emails from other ExtraTorrent “copies”, all trying to get a piece of the action. Not unexpected, but pretty bold, particularly considering the fact that ExtraTorrent operator SaM specifically warned people not to fall for these fakes and clones.

With millions of people moving to new sites, it’s safe to say that the torrent ‘community’ is in turmoil once again, trying to find a new status quo. But this probably won’t last for very long.

While some of the die-hard ExtraTorrent fans will continue to mourn the loss of their home, history has told is that in general, the torrent community is quick to adapt. Until the next site goes down…